Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Marine Reservoir Effects In Seal (Phocidae) Bones In The Northern Bering And Chukchi Seas, Northwestern Alaska, Joshua Reuther, Scott Shirar, Owen Mason, Shelby L. Anderson, Joan B. Coltrain, Adam Freeburg, Peter Bowers, Claire Alix, Christyann M. Darwent, Lauren Y.E. Norman

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

We explore marine reservoir effects (MREs) in seal bones from the northern Bering and Chukchi Seas regions. Ringed and bearded seals have served as dietary staples in human populations along the coasts of Arctic northeast Asia and North America for several millennia. Radiocarbon (¹⁴C) dates on seal bones and terrestrial materials (caribou, plants seeds, wood, and wood charcoal) were compared from archaeological sites in the Bering Strait region of northwestern Alaska to assess MREs in these sea mammals over time. We also compared these results to ¹⁴C dates on modern seal specimens collected in AD 1932 and …

Anatomy Of Disaster Recoveries: Tangible And Intangible Short-Term Recovery Dynamics Following The 2015 Nepal Earthquakes, Jeremy Spoon, Chelsea E. Hunter, Drew Gerkey, Ram Bahadur Chhetri, Alisa Rai, Umesh Basnet, Anudeep Dewan

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

The April/May 2015 Nepal earthquakes and aftershocks had catastrophic impacts on rural households living in biophysical extremes. Recoveries from natural hazards that become disasters have tangible and intangible short- and long-term dynamics, which require linked quantitative and qualitative methods to understand. With these premises in mind, we randomly selected 400 households in two accessible and two inaccessible settlements across two of the highest impacted districts to assess variation in household and settlement recoveries through tangible impacts to infrastructure and livelihood and intangible impacts to place attachment and mental well-being. We conducted household surveys, in-depth interviews, and focus groups over two …

"Through A Forest Wilderness:” Native American Environmental Management At Yosemite And Contested Conservation Values In America’S National Parks, Rochelle Bloom, Douglas Deur

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

Chapter 9. The philosophies and views of nature prevalent in the 19th century West shaped the early National Park Service, and continue to influence park policy today. Park-builders incorrectly viewed early parks as untouched “wilderness,” even as Native peoples continued to occupy, revere, and actively manage lands and resources on these lands. This misapprehension fostered the creation and enforcement of park regulations meant to protect wild spaces, resulting in the displacement of both Native peoples and the culturally significant habitats that they had helped sustain for millennia. Among these regulations, federally imposed restrictions on burning and other traditional plant community …

Balance On Every Ledger: Kwakwaka’Wakw Resource Values And Traditional Ecological Management, Douglas Deur, Kim Recalma-Clutesi, Chief Adam Dick

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

This chapter illustrates the core environmental values of the Kwakwaka’wakw (Kwakiutl) people on the Pacific coast of Canada to explore how they manifest in the traditional management of coastal natural resources. The authors’ survey of environmental values is based on the authentic knowledge of Chief Adam Dick, a co-author of the chapter. The chapter argues that talking about Indigenous Knowledge without the broader context of environmental values can lead to serious scholarly misunderstandings and insists that long-term collaborations between academic researchers and specialized knowledge holders from Indigenous communities is necessary in order to represent Indigenous Knowledge accurately.

This chapter illustrates …

Navigating Multidimensional Household Recoveries Following The 2015 Nepal Earthquakes, Jeremy Spoon, Drew Gerkey, Ram Bahadur Chhetri, Alisa Rai, Umesh Basnet

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

Natural disaster recovery is multidimensional and takes time depending on vulnerabilities. Changeo ccurs as households embedded within integrated social and environmental systems adapt or transform.We focus on the April/May 2015 Nepal earthquakes to understand rural natural disaster recovery. We conducted household surveys on critical earthquake impacts and recovery trajectories with 400 ran-domly selected households in four clusters of settlements in two districts with catastrophic impacts to all houses and infrastructure. To track rapid change in the short-term, we completed surveys at two intervals—approximately 9 months and 1.5 years. Using non-metric multidimensional scaling (NMDS) ordination, our analysis explores relationships among critical …

Fire, Native Ecological Knowledge, And The Enduring Anthropogenic Landscapes Of Yosemite Valley, Douglas Deur, Rochelle Bloom

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

Yosemite Valley is a place with rich and enduring traditions of Indigenous Ecological Knowledge, manifesting in specific management practices that, in turn, leave discernible imprints upon the natural landscape. Historically, the Native American inhabitants of Yosemite Valley have employed a variety of techniques that materially enhance the availability of culturally preferred plant communities. This chapter identifies specific techniques that appear consistently in the oral traditions and written historical accounts of the valley. These methods included anthropogenic burning, pruning and coppicing, clearing underbrush beneath trees, hand eradication (“weeding”) of certain competing species, selective harvesting, smoking, “knocking” of dead wood from the …

"The People's Commune Is Good": Precarious Labor, Migrant Masculinity, And Post-Socialist Nostalgia In Contemporary China, Xia Zhang

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

Post-socialist China is characterized by the loss of social and economic safety nets for workers, particularly the most marginalized. Scholars and others have assumed that informal laborers lack the associational power needed to mitigate the precarity of their lives. Drawing on ethnographic data collected between 2004 and 2016 in Chongqing, this article examines the ways in which precariously employed rural migrant men create their own safety nets by drawing on their past experiences of agricultural collectivization in the socialist era to form cooperative associations. It further explores how these men leverage cultural resources from the socialist period to retain male …

Reframing Native Knowledge, Co-Managing Native Landscapes: Ethnographic Data And Tribal Engagement At Yosemite National Park, Rochelle Bloom, Douglas Deur

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

Several Native American communities assert traditional ties to Yosemite Valley, and special connections to the exceptional landmarks and natural resources of Yosemite National Park. However, tribal claims relating to this highly visible park with its many competing constituencies—such as tribal assertions of traditional ties to particular landscapes or requests for access to certain plant gathering areas—often require supporting documentation from the written record. Addressing this need, academic researchers, the National Park Service and park-associated tribes collaborated in a multi-year effort to assemble a comprehensive ethnographic database containing most available written accounts of Native American land and resource use in Yosemite …

Benediction: The Teachings Of Chief Kwaxsistalla Adam Dick And The Atla’Gimma (“Spirits Of The Forest”) Dance, Douglas Deur, Kim Recalma-Clutesi, William White

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

Like the symposium that inspired this book, its contents are preceded by the words of Chief Kwaxsistalla wath-thla Adam Dick. His name, Kwaxsistalla – bequeathed to him by his father and grandfather, who had inherited the name from generations going back to the beginning of remembered time – is a chiefly title that means “smoke from his fire reaches around the world.” He was chief of the Qawadiliqalla (Wolf) Clan of the Dzawada7enuxw (Tsawataineuk) Kwakwa’kawakw from Kingcome Village on the mainland coast of British Columbia.

Migrant Emplacement: Gendered Subjects, State Regulations, And The Discursive Erasure Of Elders In Sri Lanka, Michele Ruth Gamburd

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

Discriminatory assumptions about family structure and care work underlie a 2013 Sri Lankan state regulation, referred to as the “Family Background Report” (FBR), which restricts the transnational labor migration of women with children under the age of five. Since the early 1980s, women from Sri Lanka have worked as domestic servants in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates. A culture of migration has developed, and labourers’ remittances sustain family financial strategies. The FBR regulations narrow people’s employment options and destabilize long-standing practices of intergenerational reciprocity. Using ethnographic data gathered in 2015, the chapter considers the potential and actual …

Walking Dena’Ina: A Cultural Landscape Report For The Telaquana Trail, Douglas Deur, Jamie Hebert, John Branson, Tricia Brown

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

The Telaquana Trail is an ancient pathway ascending from the shores of Qizhjeh Vena, Lake Clark, through tundra and timbered valleys, into a high-elevation expanse of rolling tundra and smaller interior lakes nearly 50 miles north of Lake Clark. The pathway is an ancestral corridor used by Native peoples since the beginning of remembered time. Though the archaeological record of the trail is still coming into focus, it lends us important clues about the trail and how it was used. For example, archaeological evidence at places like Twin Lakes and Snipe Lake suggests that ancestral Native communities occupied and traveled …

Proper Conjugation Of Bodies: Chastity, Age, And Care Work In Sri Lankan Migrants’ Families, Michele Ruth Gamburd

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

Physical and symbolic aspects of bodies limit the migration trajectories of female domestic workers from a Buddhist community in coastal Sri Lanka. Government regulations and family decisions regarding women’s overseas labour draw upon and in turn influence discourses about gender, sexuality, age, health, and class. This ethnographic analysis illustrates that local norms task women with nurturing the brains of babies, preserving the chastity of teenage daughters, caring for frail elders, and preventing their working-class husbands from overindulging in liquor or having sex with other women. Successful social reproduction depends on the proper conjunctions of bodies in the extended family. Corporeal …

“Their Markers As They Go”: Modified Trees As Waypoints In The Dena’Ina Cultural Landscape, Alaska, Douglas Deur, Jamie Hebert

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

The Inland Dena’ina, an Athabaskan people of south-central Alaska, produce and value Culturally Modified Trees (CMTs) in myriad ways. Ethnographic interviews and field visits conducted with Inland Dena’ina residents of the village of Nondalton, Alaska, reveal the centrality of CMTs in the creation and valuation of an Indigenous cultural landscape. CMTs serve as waypoints along trails, as Dena’ina people travel across vast distances to hunt wide-ranging caribou herds and fish salmon ascending rivers from Bristol Bay. CMTs also provide bark and sap used in Dena’ina material culture and medicines, leaving signature marks upon the spruce, birch, and other trees found …

Between “Us” And “Them”: Political Subjectivities In The Shadows Of The 2018 Brazilian Election, Charles H. Klein, Milena Mateuzi Carmo, Alessandra Tavares

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

This article examines political subjectivities, community engagements and voting practices among residents of São Paulo’s Zona Sul peripheries in the three years preceding Brazil’s 2018 presidential election. Building on a 398-person household survey, 46 in-depth interviews, and extensive participation observation over the course of a fouryear study, we argue that although most residents of our study communities across the political spectrum are disenchanted with institutional politics, many maintain political engagement through their everyday lives, including activism centered on intersectional identities and state-sponsored violence/genocide. Our discussion combines statistical analysis and auto-ethnographic inflected vignettes and is in dialogue with two common themes …